“... work. It is there in his remark that painting was a ‘science’, a loaded word at that date. William Whewell, prompted by Coleridge, coined the term ‘scientist’ in 1833, but before that there was, for most of Constable’s life, a free-flowing interchange between art and the ever expanding catch-all of ‘natural philosophy’. Luke Howard’s essay ...”

“... the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a world ...”

“... spirits’ – the British-born painter Thomas Cole and the Romantic poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant – whom he depicted contemplating a lushly idealised Catskills landscape of bluffs and waterfalls, their names inscribed like those of lovers on a nearby birch tree. Cole and Durand are reunited in an intimate exhibition of 25 Hudson River ...”

“... to Merseyside and other ‘development areas’ – amounted to a temporary lifeboat mostly for white male workers. Docker registration, introduced in 1947, ensured that, as long as they made themselves available for shifts, registered dockers now received a guaranteed wage and, once they had earned this out, extra payments for extra shifts. Local boards ...”

“... Beautiful Slim says, mourning his lover. Yet death also has a levelling effect: Blackie, the white protagonist, observes that all the dead, white and black, have the same ‘smoke-blackened flesh’. In his novels, Himes depicted the whole of American life as a prison inferno, a blaze of race, sex and power, where ...”

“... William Empson maintained that there was a right and a wrong moment to bring theory into the business of intelligent reading, and that the professionals chose the wrong one, but he could not do without theory altogether. His book The Structure of Complex Words (1951) contains quite a lot of it; so it is not surprising that a generation of literary theorists, not wishing to remain totally out of touch with the best critic of his time, has decided to appropriate Complex Words, a work hitherto much less influential than the very early (and prodigious) Seven Types of Ambiguity ...”

“... he lists Henry Vanderborcht, John Vander-heydon, Adrian Van-Diest, Sir Anthony Vandyck, William Vander-velde, Francis Vanzoon, Herman Verelst and F. de Vorsterman, and with a little more diligence he could easily have doubled this collection of foreign Englishmen. Of the 106 painters accorded a biographical sketch by Buckeridge, 55 were immigrants ...”

“... besides generality, simplicity and predictive power: we inherit a body of past doctrine and, like William James, Quine attaches value to ‘minimum mutilation’ of this past doctrine: but this is an internal constraint on the acceptability of a construction of the world. The world, as Quine views it, seems to be a human construction. Truth Quine’s view of ...”

“... they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean doctors, judges and lawyers were invariably white and England came to be associated with rectitude, the pulling-up of socks and standing to attention. In the Cadet Corps, on school Speech Days, whenever the National Anthem was played, Englishness compelled deference and a feeling that one was in the ...”

“... and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William Buckley’s conservative bastion at the National Review to Harold Hayes’s soft-core liberal stronghold at Esquire, and from a Jesuit seminary to the Henry Luce Chair of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University? At its ...”

“... Western attitudes, are fairly hysterical. The professional shark-hater and shark-killer Captain William E. Young remarked in his 1934 memoir Shark! Shark! that the very word summons up a powerful mental image of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might ...”

“... Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all the way through the block. (The fitting into the city is graceful, and throughout the museum Taniguchi provides unexpected glimpses of nearby buildings.) You then turn to mount a grand stairway where you are greeted, on the first ...”

“... sign.The sign said: ‘Coloured not admitted.’ ‘My playmates,’ Hughes continued, ‘who were white and lived next door to me, could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again.’ In elementary school his teacher made ‘unpleasant and derogatory remarks about Negroes’ and he was stoned by classmates on his way ...”

“... which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that the images only passed where the ...”

“... of public expectation, and how to meet it, that bedevilled Nancy Reagan during her time in the White House. ‘By the end of 1981,’ she tells us, ‘I had a higher disapproval rating than any first lady of modern times.’ Joan Didion called her smile ‘a study in frozen insincerity’. Gloria Steinem called her ‘the marzipan wife’. The Chicago ...”